Multi-channel clamor recently, consisting of people telling me the XS comment ecology has turned into a sewer. This claim is beyond all serious question true. Laissez-faire has failed here. Some kind of ruthless torching-out process is likely in the near future.

If anyone has practical suggestions for restoring some basic level of comment quality, please pass it on. In the absence of anything neater, I’ll probably just start brutally culling comments that seem to lower the tone — from what it was a year or two back (it’s scarcely possible to lower the tone of what it’s become).

Any response that doesn’t begin from realistic acceptance of how badly things have gone to shit will be laughed at, then ignored. Please be my guest and try it though, just for the entertainment value.

No plans to make the purge retrospective. The current dismal state of commentary will be preserved as a monument to the workings of entropy, and a lesson to anyone extravagantly confident about the working of spontaneous order in micro-scale cultural institutions.

Yes, there’s been plenty of entropy on the posting side too. (That strikes me as an at least partially-separable issue.)

XS has a few quibbles with this project, while nevertheless thinking it’s probably the most intelligent thing taking place on the right at the moment. (Some highly interesting chat here, or directly here.)

The reliance on personal discretion for ideological vetting is a sign of immaturity (as Pax seems to accept, since it’s intended to be temporary). Less protocol governance-oriented types will probably find this less of a needling issue than this blog does. In any case, the scheme is inclined towards trustlessness, which is the primary functional criterion for all 21st Century social technology.

A more intriguing quibble is that the “co-op grocery store” model runs directly contrary to basic NeoCam principles, since it deliberately offers a role in governance to customers. This could be the basis for an important conversation down the road.

Main positive, as always with Pax Dickinson initiatives, is that it aims (competently) to latch onto the grain of the Internet, and that of auto-catalytic social machinery more generally. Whenever the “What is to be Done?” question arises, this is the type of thing that needs pointing to. Pieces of the future manifestly drift back into it.

Here are the first three installments of the Counter.Fund Gentle Introduction (1, 2, 3). The first is written by Pax Dickinson, the next two co-written with Anthony Demarco.

Correction: July 4, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article attributed incorrectly a Twitter statement to the North Korean government. The North Korean government did not belittle a joint American-South Korean military exercise as “demonstrating near total ignorance of ballistic science,” that statement was from the DPRK News Service, a parody Twitter account.